Determination of major non-development criteria for Iranian particle board industry by applying analytic hierarchy process

Development trend of Iranian particleboard industry is not satisfactory. Effective indicators in non-development of the industry were divided into five major groups, i.e. by economic, raw material and product, social, technical and man power, rules and regulation plus 23 subsections. After obtaining the two-by-two comparisons of the mentioned criteria and subsections from the experts in the industry, their weighting values were calculated using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) while group decision making were conducted using Expert Choice software. The results of this study showed that inconsistency ratio for all average comparison matrices are smaller than 0.1 and the overall inconsistency ratio is 0.02. Therefore, the judgments in current study have high consistency. Moreover, the results indicated that among 23 effective sub-criteria in non development of the industry, the following sub-criteria had the highest priority respectively: Lack of raw material, non-expert elements, lower production quality, changing of management, long decision making process and ancient technology. Feasible solutions have been suggested to develop of the industry. © The Wood Technology Society of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining 2009.